With IT spend at an estimated 2.5% of the total NHS budget, Atos Healthcare ( http://www.atoshealthcare.com ) hosted a seminar to discuss the benefits of the NHS Infrastructure Maturity Model™ (NIMM™). At which Dr Mark Ferrar, NHS Director of Infrastructure, Technology Office in the Department of Health Informatics Directorate, spoke about the importance of infrastructure in delivering 21st century healthcare. From the seminar, a video was developed with Mark talking about how NIMM™ has been developed specifically for the healthcare market, how it contributes to driving out inefficiencies, its importance in enabling dialogue with a business that focusses on return on investment and its role in ensuring infrastructure provides a solid bedrock on which to deliver line of business applications.

Click here to view the video.

According to McKinsey,  knowledge workers are an expensive asset, typically earning a wage premium that ranges from 55 percent to 75 percent over the pay of task workers who perform more basic production and transaction tasks. The nature of the collaborative work performed by these knowledge workers ranges from high levels of abstract thinking on the part of scientists to day-to-day improved decision-making and problem solving.

A big challenge is measuring the productivity of knowledge workers, these measures are at best difficult to quantify in traditional terms where as for production workers, productivity can be easily measured in terms of units of output and for transaction workers they can be measured in terms of operations per hour etc. But for knowledge workers, the degree of collaboration productivity depends on the quality and quantity of knowledge and document sharing that happens.

Having spent a significant amount of time and money investing in a system to help knowledge workers by enabling collaboration, document & knowledge sharing, how do you actually get people to use it and continue to use it beyond the honeymoon period? Not everyone is a natural collaborator, this can be either deliberate or just a natural feature of someone’s personality.

This is a BIG issue and there is no real easy answer, I don’t claim to have a silver bullet, but, the approach I suggest might give you some ideas.

I suggest adopting a two-pronged approach which aims to encourage someone to collaborate and discourage them from withholding. This approach is very straightforward, but the trick is how to find an effective way of encouraging and discouraging a typical information worker so that they become (and remain) effective collaborators.

One approach I like is to adopt tactics that both give and take, for example in order to encourage someone you should give them something they want or value and/or take away from them something they don’t want, conversely, in order to discourage someone you should give them something they don’t want or take away something they do want and value. Now this seems a bit harsh but as a strategy and if implemented in the right way, it can be effective.

So here is an example to illustrate my point:

Scenario: A document library has been setup using new technology (such as SharePoint) in order to store project related document, best practices, advice, lessons learned etc, The goal for this document library is to help people avoid re-inventing the wheel and to improve the efficiency and quality of projects by re-using what has been proven to work well in other projects.

The system has been in place for 3 months and after the initial “hype of expectation” (honeymoon!), hardly any new documents are being uploaded and the usage statistics suggest that many users who should be contributing and using the shared resources have reverted back to the old ways of “hoarding” information. As a result of this, projects are starting to suffer again from not re-using what is already known in the organisation and people get frustrated (or give up) trying to find in-house examples of best practice.

Challenge 1: How should you motivate people to contribute project collateral so that others can use it. Using the Encourage/Discourage/GIVE/TAKE strategy mentioned above, you might want to structure some approaches as follows:

• Encourage –GIVE
  • Give recognition to those that contribute (name the top contributors)
  • Find a way to give regular contributors status amongst peers
  • Give recognition to actual content shared (use some form or rating system good –> excellent)
  • Give small but tangible reward (small gifts, extra time off work etc)
• Encourage – TAKE
  • Remove any obstacles to use, i.e. make sure the systems are as easy and effortless as possible to collaborate and share documents
  • Remove the need to positively take action, i.e. make it the default that public documents are shared automatically unless you override and mark content as private
• Discourage-GIVE
  • Ask people to document (in a monthly status report) reasons for not collaborating
  • Give non contributors the additional job responsibility or reviewing other peoples content
• Discourage-TAKE
  • Remove unfiltered internet access (block certain public networking sites)

There are many others tactics apart from the examples I have listed above, hopefully you get the idea.

Following on from my blog entry about technology and private information I wanted to post another example which contrasts the attitude toward sensivite/private data and something tangible like cash.

Some time ago there was much debate about having a screen time-out facility for PCs used by clinicians in open areas. Here an NHS Trust was trying different technology configurations to overcome issues when people sometimes walked away from a PC leaving it unlocked and potentially exposed to unauthorised viewing of private information.

Much debate was had on getting the balance right in the time-out setup so that it did not lock-out to early and thus annoy/interfere with it’s use OR have it unlocked too long thus creating a window of opportunity for misuse.  No matter what configurations and valid choices were suggested, it felt to me that a timeout would never solve the problem.

Now consider this… I went to a large department store recently to get a shirt, I asked a cashier if she could tell me where my size (extra-long fitting) might be. INSTINCTIVELY she locked the cash till (sort of logged off the device) then took me to where the 2″ longer shirts were. Why is it so instinctive in the cashier and not so instinctive for someone using a PC with sensitive data on it? Probably because she is working with CASH that has a hard tangible value AND she has personally logged onto the till AND I guess she is personally responsible for making up any “loss” at the end of the day.

Not sure there’s an easy answer…

I have created a poll to see what people feel are the top reasons to consolidate their data center.

Please feel free to add a reason if you don’t see it listed. Thanks

I have recently started following the work of Dan Ariely, he is a professor at Sloan School of Management and at the Media Lab at MIT. He works in the area of Behavioral Economics.

I find much of his research a fascinating insight into how human beings exhibit irrational behaviour in real life situations (more on this later). In reading Dan’s work I try to relate what he says to my everyday work and home experiences, this bring for me a sense of purpose to Dan’s work.

One area Dan talks about is basic human honesty and the moral values in everyone of us. Why is it that many people are happy to “take home” the odd pen, pencil, note pad from the company stationary cupboard without much (if any) sense of doing anything wrong. How many of those would actually take the equivalent money from say a donations box at work.

I can relate this to an issue I came across some time ago while listening to a hospital CIO talk about a celebrity that had been admitted into his hospital. A short time after the celebrity was admitted, the IT department was able to detect (as part of routine checking processes) an unusually high number of unexplained instances of people viewing that celebrities hospital notes. The notes were viewed from departments and individuals that were not involved in that celebrities stay in hospital. When questioned as to why they viewed the records, most people said “I did not think I was doing anything wrong” or “I was just browsing through information on the screen”.

The important thing I note is that technology had somehow detached the patient as a private individual from their notes. Would those same people who tapped a few keys, swiped their smartcard and viewed that celebrities notes have behaved the same way if they had to walk into an office and pickup a bundle of papers and x-rays in that patients file? Probably not, working with paper, folders and other tangible media somehow makes the information more real and private.

So the challenge here is how do we get technology to re-connect a private individual with the information that is stores digitally about them in order to preserve privacy and confidentiality?

I had an interesting conversation last week with someone from the NHS on how to apply the 5 NIMM maturity levels to each infrastructure capability. Our discussion related to possible confusion around NIMM level 5 and how you would actually score (without published KPIs) certain infrastructure capabilities as being truly Innovative (which is the definition for Level 5).

Take Change Management as an example, I think that it is clear to most people what Change Management would be like at NIMM Level 1 (Basic), NIMM Level 2 (Controlled), NIMM Level 3 (Standardised) and NIMM Level 4 (Optimised), but, what would Change Management be like at NIMM Level 5 (Innovative)?

I have given this some thought and come to the conclusion that for me there are three equally valid approaches that you can take when scoring an infrastructure capability:

1. You could take the Level 5 tag “Innovative” literally and look for characteristics in the way you do Change Management that enable Change Management  to function itself in an innovative way

OR

2. You could look for characteristics in the way you do Change Management that enable innovation in the capabilities that consume or rely on Change Management services

OR

3. You could take the Level 5 tag “Innovative” less literally and view this as the highest level of maturity appropriate for that capability that will contribute to the IT Infrastructur’s OVERALL capability to enable innovation.

In Summary….

At an individual capability level you need to consider if the way you are delivering an infrastructure service goes beyond being optimised and is really innovative OR take a view that Level 5 being about innovation only really applies if the result of having individual capabilities operating beyond Level 5 is resulting in the IT infrastructure as a whole enabling innovation.

PS. Worrying about the finer points of scoring NIMM Level 5 is a nice problem to have

No – I am not going to revisit the whole debate triggered by Nicholas G. Carr in his paper “Does IT Matter” I am however going to think through what makes organisations resource strategic and see how this fit’s in my mind with what IT Infrastructure is and what it enables.

The first interesting question is “what kind or resource is IT Infrastructure”?Most organisations will have physical, financial, human, intellectual and reputational resources. So where in this asset landscape does IT and more specifically IT Infrastructure fit?

The second question is “what makes a resource strategic”? According to Jay Barney (1991), resources to generate and sustain competitive advantage must exhibit the following 4 attributes:

1. They must be valuable in the sense that they exploit opportunities or neutralises treats in an organisations environment
2. They must be rare amongst an organisations current and potential competitors
3. They must be difficult or impossible to intimate or create a perfect copy
4. There cannot be strategically equivalent substitutes easily available

So using my interpretation of these 4 attributes it soon becomes apparent to me that IT Infrastructure itself is not strategic, instead the outcomes and changes that IT Infrastructure enable through innovation can be strategic.

My final question for you to consider is what percentage if the outcomes enabled your IT Infrastructure are strategic? or to put it another way, which IT Infrastructure initiatives are you investing in that enable outcomes which meet 3 out of the 4 strategic resource attributes as defined by Jay Barney?

The Public Accounts Committee published a report on the 10th of September titled “Learning and Innovation in Government”

This report discusses how the public sector can “identify and implement innovative ways of tackling problems” in order to “delivering services with reduced resources” (I assume this means do more with less and NOT delivering services that are themselves reduced).

In the current climate CIOs can take two basic strategies, reduce what they spend and do more with what they already have. In reality a combination of both is needed although I personally feel that most CIOs have in recent years been through a number of cost saving iterations – how much more can you slice? CIOs should consider placing a greater emphasis on how innovation can help you do more with what you have. The down side is that the word innovation is often abused and means so many different things to different people (a bit like “Enterprise Architect”).

The Public Accounts Committee report is very readable and well worth taking a look.

This report highlights the following barriers to innovation: 

• poor sharing of knowledge across organisational boundaries;
• risk-averse attitudes which both stifle innovation and prevent lessons being learned;
• learning and innovation not being built routinely into staff appraisals and competency frameworks;
• too few ideas being generated from service users, suppliers and other organisations, and their own front-line staff;
• many staff considering they do not have the incentives to learn or to innovate.

The report goes on to set out a number of principles and makes recommendations, in particular I want to highlight:

An innovative tone needs to be set at the top. Leaders need to be role models, setting a positive example and lending their full support to others who demonstrate such behaviours.

Organisations should form networks beyond their borders, pro-actively seeking to share Information…

Front-line staff are often best-placed to identify innovative solutions to problems. Systems are needed to draw on front-line staff…

Learning and innovation in government require the right balance of incentives and rewards, well informed understanding of risk, and determined leadership.

Innovation cannot be driven from the centre of government but central bodies have an important role to play in spreading knowledge of what works.

A colleague of mine at Atos has written a white paper on “Advanced Configuration and Asset Management” as he says his summary -

“Configuration and Asset Management is not a subject to attract immediate enthusiasm from executives. Why is this? Probably because they have other business critical issues on their agenda. Or is it because – plainly stated – Configuration and Asset Management is all about collecting and storing data in a database?”

All too often people focus of the technology behind this IM&T capability and loose sight of the real business value that you can get from Configuration and Asset Management. Configuration and Asset Management underpins so many other best practices and can provide the “IT business intelligence” anybody responsible for delivering IT services (from the CIO down!) needs to make better decisions – from “what needs to be patched” through to planning IM&T strategy and business change.

To get hold of a copy of this white paper, see the link below 

http://www.atosorigin.com/en-us/Business_Insights/Thought_leadership/Thought_leadership_Container/wp_advanced_configuration_asset_mgt.htm

Innovation is a fuzzy word which means many things to different people. Ask one person what innovation means to them and they might say “New technologies”, ask another and they might say “Disruptive changes”, ask another and they might say “New market offerings”.

Whatever your views on innovation, two things are always true

1. innovation is about originality – innovation needs creativity
2. innovation is about adding value – innovation needs a purpose

Innovation does not always have to be radical – using what you already have in a different and original way to enable change so that you can solve a problem or create new opportunities is as innovative as developing a radical new product or idea which shifts the market.

Of the many faces of innovation, technology and product innovation are the best known and understood especially in the IT community. Another type of innovation, Business Model Innovation, is gaining more attention today. Driven by the ease at which products can now be copied and an increasing interest in Open Innovation (collaborative innovation), Business Model Innovation is where organisations should be focusing to help them through these difficult times.